The assignee of the present invention has developed a novel three-dimensional user interface that allows a user to intuitively locate and access resources from a computing device. The user may interact with the user interface, which appears to exist in a three-dimensional space, and which can be projected onto various display means. Accordingly, the user interface can also be referred to as a Spatial User Interface, or a SUI. Various embodiments of the SUI are described in pending U.S. application Ser. No. 09/527,917 filed Mar. 17, 2000, and in pending U.S. application Ser. No. 09/809,330 filed Mar. 16, 2001.
The SUI, in a preferred embodiment described in the pending applications, comprises multiple portals. Each portal, when not empty, may contain sensory cues to provide a cue, preferably a visual cue, as to the content contained within the portal or to the data associated with the portal in which the sensory cue is located. Sensory cues are associated with an application and may correspond to any type of data or content, including static or dynamic documents, three dimensional holograms or another SUI.
For example, a sensory cue displaying an image of a movie may be associated with an MPEG player to play the movie. A sensory cue showing a page of a spreadsheet may be associated with a spreadsheet application. A sensory cue showing a web page may have a web browser associated with it.
One form of sensory cue is a snapshot of a window used by the associated application (e.g. a web page or a page of a text document) when the application was last active. A snapshot is a way to automatically generate a relevant image for a sensory cue, as it simply takes a picture or snapshot of a screen to be used as a visual cue. However, the snapshot is merely a representation of the underlying content or data that does not support user interaction with the content or data represented by the sensory cue.
In an embodiment of the SUI described in the pending applications, a portal can also be selected by the user. The selected portal is also referred to as an active portal. When a portal becomes active, the SUI is rotated to have the portal face the user. The sensory cue within the portal is enlarged for better viewing and the portal frame is altered to highlight the portal. The active portal is then made large enough for user interaction upon double-clicking the portal, for example, and any application associated with the portal is activated. This permits user interaction with the content or data associated with the portal.
Where many of the sensory cues contained in portals of a SUI are visual cues such as pictures or snapshots, an increasingly large amount of computing resources (e.g. processing power, memory) may be required to display all the visual cues within the portals of the SUI, particularly where the visual cues may be composed of memory intensive graphics (e.g. bitmap images), and particularly when the number of portals which comprise the SUI becomes increasingly large (e.g. thousands of portals). Furthermore, as the number of portals in a SUI increases in size, it becomes increasingly difficult to continuously update sensory cues contained in portals to reflect rapidly changing content or data associated with the portal. It also becomes increasingly difficult for users to determine the nature of the content or data being associated with the different portals of the SUI.